


Pain

by santasfe



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Arrowverse - Fandom
Genre: Evil tommy too, Fighting, Minor Character Death, Pain, Violence, i talk about him dealing with pain and having a few scars and bleeding and stuff but thats about it, injuries, poor Tommy, shouldnt be anything too bad, uh im bad at tags, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 11:10:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19018717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/santasfe/pseuds/santasfe
Summary: First came the headache. The feeling of their brain pounding against their head, trying to break free. Soon after came the nausea. The horrible feeling of needing to throw up. The feeling that your stomach had a rope tied around it with someone pulling it tighter and tighter with every pull. Along with the headache and nausea came the dizziness. Where it felt like the world was spinning so fast you could barely see. Where it felt like with every step you take, you’re going to fall flat on your face. Finally, it would become harder to see, black dots taking over your vision, swimming across everything you could see, before finally falling into darkness.~~~~~(Ah look at me with bad story names again)





	Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Alrighty so this is terribly named and badly written. I wrote this sometime last year too so I'm sorry for how bad it sucks. I've barely read through it and edited it either, sorry! Anyways, important stuff you need to know: Evil!Tommy Merlyn is my favourite headcannon ever. So to make this story make sense I just gotta quickly say that 1. Malcolm brings Tommy back via the Lazarus Pits. 2. Tommy is a villain at night and goes around killing people because of side affects from the Lazarus Pit. He doesn't know that he does this and 3. Its set after season 1 also Tommy doesn't know how he came back alive or that Malcolm is alive. Okay wow that's a lot of explaining sorry folks! Enjoy!

_First came the headache. The feeling of their brain pounding against their head, trying to break free. Soon after came the nausea. The horrible feeling of needing to throw up. The feeling that your stomach had a rope tied around it with someone pulling it tighter and tighter with every pull. Along with the headache and nausea came the dizziness. Where it felt like the world was spinning so fast you could barely see. Where it felt like with every step you take, you’re going to fall flat on your face. Finally, it would become harder to see, black dots taking over your vision, swimming across everything you could see, before finally_ _falling into darkness._

     That was the kind of pain Tommy felt  _everyday_. However, he never remembered the pain. He never remembered the headaches, the ropes tightening, the spinning earth or the plunging into darkness. He remembered none of it. The only thing he remembered was waking up with a sore head, sore arms, sore legs, sore _everything, everyday_. He tried to take medicine to help with the pain in the morning, but none of it worked. No matter what he did, the pain  _never_  went away. He tried to go to doctors after having the same pain for weeks. He tried to look online, but his efforts were in vain because no matter what he did, it always failed.  
  
      It had been two months since the pain started, around a week after he came back to Starling City, so by now he was used to it. Sometimes he barely even noticed the pain, while other times it hurt too much to ignore. However, the most worrying moments were when he woke up with scratches and cuts on him. At first he didn’t really worry about the scratches, he just assumed he scratched himself by accident on something. But then some days he woke up with long scars across his arms or chest. That’s when he got really worried. Still, no doctors could help him. So he just got used to it and most of the time it wasn’t that bad, so he put up with it. It’s not like he could do anything about it anyways. So, he just suffered through the pain.  
  
     But that wasn’t the only strange thing that kept happening. During the month Tommy was gone from Starling something happened. People became more cold towards him, his friends acted like they barely knew him. Some days Oliver refused to even acknowledge him. He tried to talk to them, he tried to ask them what was wrong but everyone walked away. Everyone ignored him. Laurel first looked at him like he was a ghost. It was like she was surprised he was in Starling, she looked at him like he was gone longer than a month or like he should have been gone for years. Then she hugged him, but it didn’t feel like a normal hug. It felt like she was holding on as if she feared if she let go or loosened her grip just a little, he would  _disappear_. Then the tears came, he wiped them away, asked her what was wrong and comforted her but she could never explain it.  
  
     Then there was Oliver. Oliver, who  _used_  to be his best friend. Oliver, who  _helped_  Tommy whenever he needed it. Oliver, who  _loved_  to talk to Tommy. Oliver, who  _was_  there for Tommy no matter what. But now.. now all Oliver did was look at him sadly or with hatred in his eyes. Some days he refused to look at him altogether. No matter how many times he tried to ask what was wrong, Oliver would ignore him. He tried to ask Felicity, Laurel, Dig, anyone who might be able to answer, but Felicity never knew what to say and just walked away, Dig looked at him disappointed every time and never explained why Oliver was angry and Laurel just told him not to worry about it. He also noticed that Laurel was more angry towards Oliver than before, he guessed it was still about Sara but he could never really tell. However, he wasn’t like that for the first week. At first Oliver seemed cautious around Tommy but soon he got back to normal and was just glad Tommy was around. But then that quickly started to fade and soon he was cold towards him, cold like everyone else was. Every time he was around them, someone would always be glaring at him and he never knew why.  
  
     When he first came back, he was asked by Oliver and a few people how he ‘survived’ but he never knew what they were on about. They said he died by having debris from the CNRI building fall on him, but he didn’t have any memory of that. They also said he knew who the Arrow was, but he didn’t remember. They said the glades were flattened due to the undertaking done by his father, but he didn’t remember that either. Which worried him. It hurt him that so many important things happened and he didn’t remember a _single_  thing about them. Instead, he had to relearn about a lot of these events. But, one of the most painful things was finding out Malcolm was dead and he was an  _orphan_. His father was dead and he didn’t know about it for  _months_  and nobody was there to comfort him. Laurel did a little and Oliver did briefly, but soon they stopped and he dealt with the pain on his own.  
  
      So while night time Tommy was dealing with the physical pain of headaches, punches, kicks and stab wounds, daytime Tommy was dealing with the emotional pain of everyone turning their backs on him. He had to deal with the pain of knowing that no matter what he did, it was always wrong. No matter how hard he tried to do something good, they would all find it bad, everyone made it seem like he messed up. No matter how much he did to try and get them to like him as much as they did before, it failed and they still  _hated_  him. Everything he did was just  _wrong_. It felt like he messed up everything and he couldn’t do anything about it. He had to deal with that pain. He had to deal with the pain of everyone he knew and loved hating him and he could do nothing about it.  
  
     On top of that pain he had nightmares. Some days he would only get a few hours of sleep as horrible thoughts and visions plagued his dreams. Sometimes the dreams were just darkness mixed with screams of terror and pain. However, he could never tell if they were his screams or someone else’s. Some days they were just him falling, falling into the dark, black abyss, feeling helpless as he couldn’t do anything to stop it, he couldn’t do anything to save himself. Then there were the ones that played out like movies, but felt so much more real. They were flashes of people fighting, blood or dead bodies on the ground. Sometimes he recognised parts of the faces and people, but he always forgot them soon after he woke up. He always called them dreams, but they didn’t seem like it was something his subconscious made up, it felt like they were memories of things he saw happen. During the day he would get visions of them too, random flashes of parts of his dream that went away as quickly as they came.  
  
      But that was the kind of pain Tommy had to deal with and he couldn’t do anything to help it, he just had to suck it up. So, he didn’t do anything about it. He had tried and he failed. He tried and he failed again. No matter what he did, he failed. No matter how many attempts, it never worked. Instead, he suffered silently, but besides, there was no one who would even care about what he was growing through. No father. No Oliver. Hardly ever Laurel. There was Thea but she was always with Roy, plus their friendship was awkward after he found out Thea liked him. So he was on his own through this. But, Tommy was growing tired of it. He was growing tired of knowing no one loved him, growing tired of having every bone in his body aching every day, growing tired of being afraid of sleeping each night. He was tired of it all and it never went away. He just wished it went away.

_Just for one day, couldn’t it all go away?_

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this pile of rubbish folks! I know its badly written and gosh the way I wrote how Oliver and stuff would act is terrible, they wouldn't act like that. Anyways, I left the ending a bit so you can also guess what you'd think happens in a way. I hope it made sense! Have a nice day! Oh btw if you think I should have added any archive warnings please let me know


End file.
